Traditional storage architecture separates primary storage from protection storage. Storage administrators have struggled with the complexity, cost, and overhead associated with the approach. Protection integrated primary (PIP) storage architecture is a new approach enabling consolidation of primary workloads and data protection into one physical storage system. PIP reduces storage costs and reduces the time for backup creation and restoration because of its integrated design.
In order to build a suitable PIP storage, one needs to balance price, performance, and capacity. A single PIP storage may utilize any type of non-volatile storage medium such as flash memory, PCIe-connected flash memory, solid state device (SSD), magnetic tape, and magneto-optical (MO) storage media to take advantage of different cost performance characteristics of different non-volatile storage medium. For example, SSDs can deliver about 500× more input/output operations per second (IOPS) than spinning disk but also have 5× the cost. SSDs, as well as other forms of flash memory, have a limited number of write-erase cycles after which a given region of memory cannot be rewritten. A tiered infrastructure, including a smaller cache/tier layer of a higher cost and higher performance medium such as SSD and a larger lower cost and lower performance medium such as disk storage, offers a good comprise. The challenge is to build the tiered infrastructure economically and with high performance.